Disclaimer: Ranma ½ and its characters and settings belong to Rumiko Takahashi, Shogakukan, Kitty, and Viz Video. Biobooster Guyver belongs to Yoshiki Takaya and Viz Communications.

Prologue

Three men, all powerfully built and possessing bulging muscles, walked down the streets of Tokyo, their massive sizes opening up a corridor of humanity as they stalked their prey. Each wore a blue and black body suit that conformed to their forms perfectly. The thinnest of the lot, a man with no hair atop his head, wore mirrored shades to conceal eyes that were slitted in a mix of reptilian and feline features. The shortest man, barely reaching over seven feet, hid behind loosely hanging auburn bangs a vestigial horn that sprouted nearly an inch from his forehead. The largest of the men would have appeared natural, if not for his immense size.

Theirs was not a mission calling for stealth. No, if anything, the three… men… were intended to draw attention and spread fear as well as apprehend someone of great importance to their cause.

Ranma twisted out of the path of a volley of razor sharp bandannas, alighting momentarily on the roof of a bakery. From there the pigtailed martial artist leaped nearly fifteen meters straight up.

"Damn you, Ranma, don't run away!!! Fight like a man!!!" Ryoga roared, tossing three more deadly bandannas at his hated foe. In midair, Ranma was king, able to seemingly defy gravity at will, but he hadn't counted on another attack while preparing to splash P-chan and end the fight early. The trio of bandannas wasn't a major threat, not in the manner that Ryoga intended, though. Ranma was forced to largely cancel his forward momentum to avoid serious injury, and even then one of the projectiles managed to graze his shoulder, sending a spike of pain through his entire left side.

Ranma landed awkwardly, his balance thrown off by the hasty aerial maneuver. His left arm hung limply at his side and blood flowed from the deep gash, only to drip continuously from his fingertips. Ryoga sneered, the advantage obviously his. With the tides of battle turning, Ryoga's depression began to lighten. He knew that soon he wouldn't be able to so much a create a battle aura, so with as much of the anger and despair as he could summon from his psyche, Ryoga formed a small, pitifully weak shi shi houkodan and flung it at Ranma, hoping to at least force his enemy to dodge rapidly and further exacerbate his wound.

Unexpectedly, Ranma did not dodge. He stood his ground; slightly favoring his right leg, and with an almost casual grace, batted the chi bolt aside. The sphere of green energy slammed into the koi pond, throwing water and dead fish into a pillar of foam that didn't quite reach Ryoga. Ryoga felt depression returning to him as the scene of his attack being disregarded so callously played through his mind repeatedly. "All I asked for was a little peace," Ranma began, "just some time to myself." An angry battle aura of deep blue seeped from his skin, brightening noticeably over the area of his damaged shoulder. No one noticed the immediate cessation of blood loss.

Ranma felt light-headed from loss of blood, but his chi bolstered flagging strength and breathed life into a body screaming for relief. "A couple hours on the roof, maybe some time to work out in the dojo. But no, it's always 'Ranma, prepare to die!' or 'Ranma, die!', or 'Die, Ranma!'. Well, you bastard, I'm not going to die." As Ranma spoke, his aura intensified, going purple as anger mixed with confidence, then darkening to nearly black as rage replaced anger. "You are!!!"

It came in a rush; a tidal wave of energy in the form of a beam as wide as Ranma was tall, and Ryoga had no defense against it. He didn't think to dodge, not that he had the necessary speed to accomplish the feat, anyway. The force of the blast actually halted momentarily as it struck Ryoga, the human equivalent to three-inch thick plate armor, but it didn't stop, and with a final scream, the lost boy was reduced to a half-charred, half-vaporized mass of cooked flesh.

Before the horror of his actions could set in, Ranma's mind collapsed into itself, barely retaining enough energy to carry out basic functions.

From a hundred miles into the interior of Japan, Zoalord Imakarum Mirabilis viewed the event through the eyes of all three of his minions. Each had sensory powers specific to its breed, and when combined into a single file, for lack of a better term, Mirabilis was able to determine the boy's bio-energy levels, muscle mass and density, as well as bone density. All other relevant information had already been gathered by Chronos spies and reliable outside sources.

/Bring him in,/ the Zoalord telepathically ordered his field agents. It was a real pity that the other one had been destroyed, his energy levels being nearly as high as the main subject's, but that was the way of life, the survival of the fittest.

The processing tank in which floated the comatose body of Ranma Saotome was no ordinary zoaform production unit. Specifically designed to heal and enhance the Zoalord breed, it was able to introduce a much more varied array of genetic changes and frequencies of energy to the subject.

"How many crystals will he need?" Mirabilis asked the gathered scientists. Ranma Saotome wasn't meant to be a new Zoalord, he was too young and mentally immature for that, but a general to direct the forces of Chronos he would be. As a human, the boy had possessed bioenergy manipulation abilities that exceeded all zoanoid breeds except for the Zoalords themselves, strength nearly that of the strongest of hyper zoanoids, and speed that rivaled all Chronos bio-constructs and even the Guyver units. Bones nearly as tough as steel and skin as resistant to blunt trauma as any Gregole zoanoid, rounded out the physical side of the sheer mystery that was Ranma. Telepathic scans conducted during the processing revealed an exceptional, if underdeveloped mind capable of photographic memory and lightning-fast thought processes. Locked within the young man's mind were hundreds of fighting styles and techniques that used and warped bio-energy or the human body in ways never dreamed of by Chronos.

In short, Chronos had a weapon that unaltered could have been a valuable asset, but now, with the Zoalord processing nearly complete, they had an ace in the hole, an exceptional fighter with powers that outstripped anything previously imagined. The power granted to Saotome, Mirabilis reflected, made him greater than any other Zoalord, but without the greater telepathic abilities that would develop with age, Ranma would be as willing a servant of his masters as the lowest of zoanoids.

Zoacrystals were nearly impossible to produce, requiring huge amounts of bio-energy to transmute the highly unstable naturally grown crystals. The effort was worth the trouble, though. The crystals, once finished, began to generate power and could be altered to give Zoalords their control over gravity and space. "With the exception of his main crystal, the subject has been designed for three auxiliary crystals. Any more than three and the risk of overloading the subject's body becomes too great," answered the scientist.

The wraparound visor that Mirabilis wore hid the shocked widening of his eyes from the scientists, something he was immensely grateful for. When he spoke, his voice was calm and level. "Only three?" How could Ranma function with only three crystals?

"Yes, my lord. One specifically keyed into gravitational fields, one for spatial flux, and another to allow for the mass change from human to Zoalord form. The subject's abnormal bio-energy levels have risen dramatically throughout the processing and instead of altering this trait, we allowed it to expand and simply built the emitters for the crystals into his new form. This saves crystals and makes him less vulnerable to debilitating injury if one or more of his crystals is severely damaged." The scientist shifted uneasily, hoping that he had not presumed too far.

Mirabilis nodded, further astounded and disturbed by Ranma. The boy's DNA, while slightly more developed than the average human, didn't account for his powers and attempted cloning had met with utter failure every time. Ranma would be a lost number, the only member of his breed. "Give him two more crystals, but keep them dormant. I will teach him how to activate them if his others are ever damaged." Five crystals was barely a third of the normal requirement for a Zoalord.

With the nutrient solution drained, Ranma's body rested in a on the slimy bottom of the processing tank. Curled into a fetal position, there were no obvious signs of the drastic changes wrought upon his body on the genetic level. Even were he to stand and be seen completely nude, no physical changes would be discernable. That, too, was by design. Ranma was meant to blend into the population, a sleeper to be awakened when the time was right. Until then he would work in the shadows, undermining the government's investigation into Chronos activities and distracting the Guyvers from their destructive incursions into Chronos territory.

A telepathic command from Mirabilis and Ranma awoke. Slowly, so as not to slip, Ranma stood, brushing back slick hair from his face in order to see what of his surroundings his hyperactive senses hadn't already revealed. He saw his master, a man looking to be no more than twenty-five years of age. Ranma knew that he could break the man almost effortlessly if not for the power he held over him in the form of fully developed telepathy, an ability that could cause him to simply die with a thought.

Mirabilis and eleven other Zoalords had participated in the reprogramming of their new tool. Together they had instilled unquestioning loyalty with intense ambition without decreasing or altering his overall intelligence. Sounding simpler than it really was, the act had taken nearly a week by itself and left the controllers of Chronos weak and exhausted. Knowledge of who he had been was left intact, and to it was added knowledge of his mission and those he would command.

"Well, you made me what I am. If you managed that, the least you could do is find me a towel," Ranma snapped.

Mirabilis raised a questioning eyebrow. He had a feeling that he and his fellow Zoalords had gotten more out of this bargain than they had originally intended.

To be continued.

Author's Notes: I've taken some liberties with a few of the aspects of the Guyver series, but not many and they're really so small that you'd really have to know a lot about the series to catch them. This is just an idea I had and used to take my mind off of a real whopper of a headache. If you want to continue it, that's fine, if not, oh well, no biggy. I just thought someone might like to work out how Ranma could deal with the changes in his life and what him being evil and working for an organization bent on conquering the world and enslaving humanity would be like. The idea I have is for Ranma to do some bad things, kill a lot of people, maybe even a Guyver or two, then gain enough telepathic independence to break control of his mind from the Zoalords. Then he could go on a new mission against Chronos or something. Heh, I just realized that Chronos is supposed to be spelled Cronos in the Guyver series, oh well, don't feel like going back and changing it.

Let's see, a standard Zoalord can do lots of stuff, but I'm gonna rank Ranma up top with Arkanfel (think that's how it's spelled, but I haven't watched or read any Guyver in a while, so I could be wrong).

Webmaster: Larry F
Last revision: May 21, 2007